1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a counterfeit detection method that can be used to authenticate a particular brand of a manufactured good.
2. Description of Related Art
The counterfeit industry is a huge and profitable market parallel only to illegal drug manufacturing and distribution. The ramification of counterfeit goods upon society goes beyond unauthorized distribution and branding of goods for the sake of monetary gains. In the health industry, for example, the consequences of counterfeit drug manufacturing are mostly catastrophic. As an example, World Health Organization (WHO) reports that “during a meningitis epidemic in Niger in 1995, more than 50000 people were inoculated with fake vaccines resulting in 2500 deaths. The vaccines were received as a gift from a country which thought they were safe.”
The manufacturers of a specialty brand may have put huge amount of resources into developing a particular good in terms of R&D, production, marketing and distribution. The counterfeit products will not only lower the sale of the legitimate product, it will reduce or eliminate the confidence of an end user in a particular brand. This notion becomes more tangible and makes more common sense in the case of fighting against a death threatening disease such as Malaria: When the counterfeit drug is manufactured with a small amount of the actual ingredient (to hide its authenticity), over time the parasite becomes resistant to that particular medicine irrespective of how effective the actual drug historically might have been in combating the deadly disease.
Many manufactures have taken various levels of defense mechanisms for their products against counterfeiting to protect their investments. However, as the technology advances, the counterfeit industry has learned to become more and more sophisticated and has learned to come up with its own ingenious methods to countermeasure the manufacturer's protection shields.
One method that is used by legitimate manufacturers in their fight against counterfeiting is to embed certain chemicals of certain characteristics that could be used to identify an authenticated good. Such detections rely upon the nature of chemical compound such as its impurity profile, crystal form, particle size or thermal behavior to determine the authenticity of the product under investigation. There are certain techniques such as infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, X-ray powder diffraction, polarized microscopy, and numerous chromatography methods to carry the authenticity test. However, these methods require advance and well equipped laboratories, and they are time consuming and quite expensive. Furthermore, for drugs, these techniques require opening the package and hence eliminating safe usage of untested pills.
Another method used to fight against the counterfeiting is in manufacturing appropriate package for a manufactured good such that it would be either very difficult or quite costly to reproduce. Yet another possibility is the inclusion of Holograms or some sort of color shifting ink on the packages. But reliance on such defense mechanisms was originally promoted based on the fact that such technologies are prohibitively costly to implement by a counterfeiter. With advances in image processing software and cheap PCs that notion no longer holds any credibility.
Another authentication method used by manufactures is the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) electronic chip embedded within a product. A specific code associated with a particular product is included with the RFID chip. Special reader is then used to read the code wirelessly and authenticates the product. The drawback with RFID solution is its associated cost which makes it especially unattractive for very low cost products (such as anti-malaria drugs). Furthermore, there are some read errors associated with RFID which puts into question the reliability and dependencies of the authentication method.
Yet another authentication method is the usage of multicolored particles imprinted upon or combined with the ingredient of a product. The product could then be given a “fingerprint” color code that could be detected during the authentication process. The identification process could be made more resilient to reverse engineering by combining the multicolored particles with other chemicals of specific properties (such as spectral emission, or infrared emission). The authentication could rely simply on the presence of specific color code, pattern matching using a camera based system, or laboratory analysis. The drawback with this detection system, aside from costly color code generation for each product item, is the level of authenticity that one requires as obviously a laboratory analysis is far more expensive than a simple presence test. Extension to these methods are inks which are visible when exposed to ultraviolet or infrared light; concealed micro printing technologies which carry a specific message; or pattern printing which are revealed only when a screened key is placed over the printed area. All these methods are hardly any major obstacle to any determined counterfeiter with enough resources.
Kodak “Traceless Technology” uses an odorless and colorless powder marker which is mixed with printing inks that is deployable on labels and packages. The marker is then detected by Kodak provided handheld readers. The company claims that competitive readers will not detect Kodak's markers and as such is immune to counterfeiting.
Hewlett Packard approach to the problem, called “Memory Spot”, is based on a principle similar to RFID and thus suffers the same shortfalls.
Encryption method is another deterrent method and one that is also used in this invention though in a totally different fashion. In prior art, a product is given a digital identity, or a serial number, which is encrypted and printed on the product in an alphanumerical form. This digital number could be also accompanied by an associated bar code to be read by a scanner. The encoded and printed digital identity is thus either manually or via a scanner is passed on to an interne site or to a call center through a phone equipped with SMS for verification. Such a method though may be effective for a small number of products; it cannot be universally applied as it certainly will flood the internet site or the call center making it virtually ineffective and quite time consuming to do a real time authentication and verification.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,996,543 issued to Coppersmith et al., tries to alleviate the above problem by using private/public pair keys where serial number are first encrypted by a pair. A reader system then reads and subsequently decodes the smart card's content and accompanying product's label using appropriate and corresponding public key pairs. Verification and authentication process then requires a comparison between the two for equality. Other than the fact that this method would require including a smart card (whose production is quite costly for most manufactures) along with every package, it is easily susceptible to counterfeiting: One with enough resources could create a smart card which could easily generates the sequence codes seen on the label. That is the counterfeiter could make a fake chip on board the smart card which feeds the smart card reader what it needs for authentication, namely the printed information seen on the label. Once that is accomplished, batches of smart cards along with duplicated labels could be made to defeat the purpose.